AAP
A benign labour force report for February will probably be sufficient for the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) to leave the official cash rate unchanged next month, economists say.
The jobless rate edged up to 5.3 per cent in February from a downwardly revised 5.2 per cent in January, with the number of people employed barely rising.
This was the first rise in the jobless rate since peaking at 5.8 per cent last October.
Just 400 jobs, seasonally adjusted, were added to the workforce in February, Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed on Thursday.
"This is a steady result," Employment Minister Julia Gillard told reporters in Canberra, adding employers move to taking on more full-time employees and reducing part-time work.
There were 11,400 full-time jobs created but these were partly offset by an 11,000 drop in part-time workers.
Economists had expected the jobless rate to edge up to 5.4 per cent with 10,000 jobs being created in February.
Ms Gillard said 615,800 people were unemployed and 128,000 of them had lost their jobs due to the financial crisis.
"That means that there's more work to do, more work to do to make sure that Australians around the country get the benefits of work," she said.
Macquarie Research senior economist Brian Redican said employment has been "incredibly strong" during the past six months with total employment rising by nearly 200,000.
"Recent labour market data is still a reason for the RBA to continue tightening, rather than pause, in our opinion,"he said.
"That said, with the headline jobs number roughly flat in February, it could be used as an excuse for the RBA to sit pat in April, if it had already decided not to tighten at successive meetings."
The rise in the jobless rate was led by a jump to 6.4 per cent in Tasmania, from 5.3 per cent the previous month, but in the most populous, NSW, it fell to 5.4 per cent from 5.6 per cent.
